I work at sea so I don't get to use a high end desktop for my flight simming most of the time. When I'm away from home I've been using high-end laptops of one form or another for the last eleven years now.

 

I thought it was time to retire my 2011 vintage MSI GT680R laptop for something newer. Being extremely impressed with my first ever MSI laptop I decided to stick with this brand which to my eyes at least offers a very nice range of gaming laptops at very affordable prices.

 

Last Friday I ordered myself a new MSI GS70 2QE-032UK - this model being called the "Ghost Pro".

 

Full specs here:

 

http://www.box.co.uk/MSI_GS70_2QE(Stealth_Pro)-032UK_1680228.html

 

I've had it for a few days now and am slowly getting all my flight sims up and running on it. I'll say straight away this is the laptop I have been waiting more than a decade to own.

 

It's incredibly thin and lightweight for a 17" laptop, it doesn't get terribly hot like some of the others I've owned, the build quality - just like my last MSI - is excellent (unlike the only Alienware I ever owned which started coming apart after just over a year). Even the AC adapter is a fraction of the size and weight of a traditional high end laptop. I understand this has a lot to do with the combination of the Haswell processor and GTX970M GPU which are much more power efficient than previous generations of laptop hardware.

 

So far I've thrown P3D2, XP10, DCS, IL-2 BOS, IL-2 1946, Falcon BMS, Rise of Flight and Wings Over Flanders Fields at this laptop and it just eats them all alive.

 

Granted P3D2 and XP10 are running with no addons (yet), but even with the settings really pushing the higher end of things this laptop seems to be able to cope with them very well. I've tried the running the F-35 in P3D2 at treetop height and 1,000 knots.... no blurries, very smooth performance. I've tried all the various weather settings, including volumetric fog and heavy overcasts, cloud and terrain shadows... it seems to handle it all very well. I'll be interested to see how well it all runs once I've thrown some Orbx into the mix, but from initial impressions it looks like I have the headroom to run those kind of addons.

 

XP10 runs like a dream. Buttery smooth, even with the default XP clouds which are performance hogs.

 

 

So for anyone like me who by necessity needs to flight sim on a laptop you could do a lot worse than pick up an MSI GS70 series.

Very nice to hear. I've been running FSX for about 4 years now on my Qosmio 18 inch Laptop and it's been a dream! Im glad this new laptop is working out for you.